Rebecca MacKinnon's postings about work, reading, and ideas from 2004-2011.

February 07, 2005

Reuters on journalists killed in Iraq

Reuters CEO Tom Glocer talks to John Battelle about plans to build an online broadcast network. Very interesting, and I'll comment more on that later. At the end of the interview they talk about Iraq and journalists who get killed there:

Q: How are things going in Iraq?

A: Nothing is as bad as the call that says, "Tom, I'm sorry, we've
lost another one." And, unfortunately, at least two of the three people
we've lost, and arguably the third one as well, have been at the hands
of U.S. forces, due to friendly fire.

Q: You have a dispute over a case in which some of your journalists were interrogated by the military in Iraq.

A: I have been to
the Pentagon and spoken to [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld's
chief of staff. I take it at face value that they do not intentionally
target journalists. My difference with them is over how hard do you try
not to target them. Their stock answer is essentially, "You want to be
safe, you embed." From a journalistic point of view, we refuse to do
only that.

Comments

I can see both sides of this issue. I certainly understand why journalists do not want to be limited to embedding.

I have nothing like firsthand knowledge, but I can also understand what I suspect the military point of view to be. The sort of operations happening in Iraq right now demand that soldiers and marines respond quickly to unexpected attacks at any moment from any direction. In such an environment, it's hard for me to see how the military can guarantee that a journalist a) will be recognized as such instantaneously and b) not be in the line of fire. Moreover, in Fallujah, for instance, one got the impression that some network correspondents were more than sympathetic to the insurgents. There were a fair number of times when photographers seemed to be just at the right place and time to see what were supposedly hit and run sort of attacks. I'm not saying they were helping the insurgents. But I am saying that being around attacks is a pretty dangerous thing to choose to do. I salute their courage. I'm not clear on how the military could protect them, given that choice however..

It's a dilemna. What is happening in Iraq - what the military calls the non-linear battlefield, in which there is no clear distinction between the front line and "behind the lines" - is probably going to be the paradigm for any armed conflicts for some time to come. And that means the question of how to operationalize protected status for journalists will probably continue to be a difficult one.